I know a lot of brilliant teachers who work with primary students and are enthusiastic about using games in their classes. If you have a look at coursebooks for primary schools and attend workshops on teaching young learners, it’s all about fun and games. …

In previous articles we discussed how the use of game principals transform the traditional way of teaching English and turn an English class into an exciting game. In this article I’d like to focus on one particular type of games, Role-Playing-Games (RPGs) and their applications at English lessons. When I…

In the previous articles we talked about two approaches to motivating millennial teens. When you apply gamification to your lesson it is a good idea to start with extrinsic motivation and introduce PBL (points-badges-leaderboard) first. To keep a long-term interest in our lessons we employ intrinsic motivation. According to D.Pink…

HOW TO GAMIFY YOUR ENGLISH CLASS. Step 2 In the first article we discussed what gamification is and why it can help English teachers to motivate millennial teens to work hard at English lessons. We started our introduction of gamification with the basics — PBL, which stand for points, badges and leaderboard. In the first article we talked…

HOW TO GAMIFY YOUR ENGLISH CLASS. Step 1 TEACHING TEENS IN THE 21st CENTURY As a teacher and a mother of a 14-year-old son every day I witness the struggle between traditional education and millennial teens born in the early 2000s. My son spends hours playing Kerbal Space. It is a computer game where your goal is to…

In some ways traditional education is very similar to games: levels/school grades, points/marks, boss fights / final tests. But what is the key difference? Sid Meier defines the game as a series of interesting decisions. In games, a player is in control of the game and makes meaningful choices. Who…

Is it more difficult for you today to work with your students? They don’t listen to you carefully because they opt for chating with their friends in social networks on their mobiles. They don’t do their homework because they prefer playing computer games to studying. They think that exercises in…